Hanukkah Hams???

Who the heck doesn't know that ham is not kosher? Especially in NYC!

A posh food store in New York's Greenwich Village has found itself red faced after offering hams for sale with the slogan "Delicious for Hanukkah," the current Jewish religious holiday.

[...]

A manager at the Balducci's gourmet grocery store told the newspaper that the sign was a mistake and blamed it on a stock clerk.

Save the environment, burn one less candle during Hanukkah

How about if Al Gore promises not to fly in a private jet during Hanukkah? That would certainly be enough, wouldn't it?

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."

This sounds like a good idea as well:

"They should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead," Ravitz said.

So, how about it, smokers? Willing to give up your cigarettes for Hanukkah?

(via)

Dean:"There are no bars to heaven for anybody"

Has Howard Dean become the Democrats' chief theologian? Will universalism become a part of the Democrat party platform? Who knew they had a position on salvation:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean came out for inclusive team prayers in public schools while speaking Sunday to a gathering of thousands of Jewish leaders, according to a leading Jewish news agency.

In another statement likely to stir debate among the evangelical Christians his party is urgently trying to court, Dean also asserted “there are no bars to heaven for anybody,” according to the report by JTA, a 90-year-old non-profit organization which calls itself “the global news service of the Jewish people.”

[...]

A DNC official said the chairman was saying that “Democrats, unlike the Republicans, are an inclusive party, respectful of all people, and he said that prayer in public settings should reflect that.” The official said Dean’s comment about prayer was “not that you can or can’t use Jesus’ name – he was not that specific at all.” The bulk of Dean’s remarks were devoted to “the power that people have to make a change when they work together,” the official said

[...]

"This country is not a theocracy," Dean said, according to JTA. "There are fundamental differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party believes that everybody in this room ought to be comfortable being an American Jew, not just an American; that there are no bars to heaven for anybody; that we are not a one-religion nation; and that no child or member of a football team ought to be able to cringe at the last line of a prayer before going onto the field."

[...]

"I'm gradually getting more comfortable with talking about religion in ways that I did not talk about it before."

He may want to work on it a bit.

Interesting caricature of the Republican party: a bunch of Christian theocrats who hate Jews and want to bar them from heaven. Talk about over the top rhetoric. It's interesting how he paints this issue of salvation in political colors. What are the Christian left supposed to do if they aren't universalists? Do they still have a place in the Democrat party? He's not knocking the Republicans, he's knocking Christians who believe the truth claim of Jesus:

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Way to reach out to the Christian community there, Dean!

Scholars try to reconcile problematic texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Apparently ecumenicalism means the rejection of your sacred text:

Speaking with mutual respect and sensitivity, prominent Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars and clergy from around the country met in Los Angeles this week to "wrestle" with what one rabbi described as the "dark side" of the three faith traditions.

Experts cited "problematic" passages from the Hebrew Scripture, the New Testament and the Koran that assert the superiority of one belief system over others.

As an example, the Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith, ecumenical and interreligous official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, quoted from the Gospel of Mark: "Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned."

Rabbi Reuven Firestone, director of the Institute for the Study of Jewish-Muslim Interrelations at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, mentioned a series of texts, including a verse from Deuteronomy: "For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples of the earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people."

And Muzammil H. Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh (Islamic Law) Council of North America, quoted from the Koran:

"You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them -- God does not guide such wrongdoers."

[...]

"After wrestling, I hope people can understand these texts in the appropriate contexts and realize that not all of them, but many of them, are bound by conditions of social milieu, of culture, of historical context."

In some instances, he continued, people of faith need to say to themselves, "This is part of my sacred tradition, but I reject it. I find this text offensive. It goes against my own morality, and it goes against what I believe God expects of me in the world today."

That calls for a great deal of theological introspection, education and courage, he said.

[...]

"We want to foster serious theological and moral thinking about those aspects of our traditions . . . that are intolerant and delegitimizes the other and have been used by extremists to foster violence and hatred," said Rabbi Eugene Korn, executive director of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding. "It's absolutely critical now because of the increase in religious violence and extreme hostility."

[...]

Speakers at the Los Angeles conference also included Rabbi Elliott Dorff, rector and professor of philosophy at American Jewish University, and Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

There will be two more meetings and then they plan to publish a book of the papers from the conference on the Internet. I can't wait to read it :-)

In the article they attempted to explain away the text of Mark stating that it was added later during the time when there were struggles between Christians and Jews (I wonder if they are referring to when James the brother of Jesus was put to death illegally).

Unfortunately, they're asking us to reject a whole lot of our Bible:

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 6:44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— 46 not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.

John 6:64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) 65 And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”

Acts 17:30 "The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

And that's just a small portion of the texts that I could cite. Christians who believe the Bible is the word of God have no intention of rejecting passages from the Bible because we would be sitting in judgment of God. That would not be a wise move on our part. Sorry, if the text offends some with it's claims of exclusivity but you're going to have to take that up with God.

Shouldn't the "ambassador for Judaism" be Jewish?

I wonder if Madonna gets that Kabbalah really isn't Judaism.

Madonna toasted the Jewish new year with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declared herself an "ambassador for Judaism," local newspapers reported Sunday.

The singer, who is not Jewish, arrived in Israel Wednesday on the eve of Jewish new year to attend a conference on Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.

Madonna met Peres at his official Jerusalem residence on Saturday evening and the two exchanged gifts, with Madonna receiving a lavishly bound copy of the Old Testament.

She gave Peres a volume of "The Book of Splendor," the guiding text of Kabbalah, inscribed "To Shimon Peres, the man I admire and love, Madonna," the Yediot Ahronot daily reported.

(via)

Saudis plan to confiscate tourists' Bibles

And other religious items. Why would any Jew or Christian think to go to Saudi Arabia and be treated in this way? How stupid to spend millions on tourism ads and then confiscate their property:

Despite a series of initiatives aimed at generating foreign tourism, the Saudi Arabian government continues to bar Jews and Christians from bringing items such as Bibles, crucifixes and Stars of David into the country and is threatening to confiscate them on sight, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

"A number of items are not allowed to be brought into the kingdom due to religious reasons and local regulations," declares the Web site of Saudi Arabian Airlines, the country's national carrier.

After informing would-be visitors that items such as narcotics, firearms and pornography may not be transported into the country, the Web site adds: "Items and articles belonging to religions other than Islam are also prohibited. These may include Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with religious symbols such as the Star of David, and others."

[...]

Over the summer, the Saudi government-run Supreme Commission for Tourism announced a number of steps, such as issuing group visas to foreigners through tour operators and granting longer entry visas, in the hopes of boosting the number of foreign tourists to 1.5 million annually by 2020.

(via)

No booze, no babes and no Bibles, what kind of vacation destination is that?

Are Jews reclaiming Jesus?

That seems to be what this guy is saying.

After two thousand years in a dark corner it seems that Jesus is making something of a comeback in the Jewish world. Not in a Christian, proselytizing "Jews for Jesus" manner, but as a historical figure, decidedly unchristian, who needs to be reassessed as a player in the Jewish tradition. In recent years the job of reclaiming Jesus has gone on in both low and high culture.

[...]

The great Jewish painter Marc Chagall, the subject of my recent biography, was, then, perhaps ahead of his time in his insistence that Jesus be seen as a great "Jewish poet and prophet." Chagall was gripped by images of Jesus from an early age, and could not, in fact, get them out of his mind. He began to paint crucifixion scenes while in his early twenties and continued to do so, sometimes obsessively, as in the years 1941-1942, throughout his long life. For Chagall it was a tragedy that religious schismatism had severed Jesus from the Jewish world. When, during the Holocaust, he searched for an image of martyrdom and suffering that would be commensurate with the suffering of the Jews, his mind moved naturally to a Jewish Jesus on the cross, a figure that, as in his great 1938 painting White Crucifixion he draped in a prayer shawl or tallit, so that viewers could not miss the point.

This Sunday, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, Nextbook is sponsoring a conference entitled "What's He Doing here? Jesus in Jewish Culture." An array of Jewish writers and thinkers: theologians, historians, poets and public intellectuals, including Leon Wieseltier, Stephen Greenblatt, Susannah Heschel, Paula Frederiksen, Jonathan Rosen, Stephen Prothero, Robert Pinsky, and I'm happy to say, myself, will attempt, as the title makes clear, to tease out the twists and turns, the history and the representation, of Jesus in Jewish culture. My man is Chagall, whose relation to Jesus is conflicted and contradictory: sometimes Chagall identified with Jesus as a suffering artist/poet, sometimes he saw him as a symbol of Jewish suffering and sometimes he portrayed him in more conventional "Christian" fashion. Others will take on Jesus and the Rabbis, Messianism, Jesus in the Promised Land. And Stephen Greenblatt, who has already let us know so engagingly what he thinks of Shakespeare, will now tell us what he thinks of Jesus.

Chagall's use of Christ to represent the suffering of the Jews is incredibly insightful, Christ went through the tribulation of the Jews on the cross (Deuteronomy 4:30) and there is no greater symbol of the suffering of the nation of Israel than the cross (I probably will develop this thought more on Life Under the Sun during the summer, so stay tuned).

I think it's great that Jesus is the current focus of Jewish thought and I'm glad that they're giving him a second look. But this type of analysis will mislead them:

and as for Jesus, we shall know him for who he was: Yeshua, a Jew who never imagined himself outside the normative Jewish tradition and who would no doubt be deeply surprised to find himself there.

It ignores the only credible record we have of Jesus' words, it totally misses what Jesus says of himself:

Matthew 5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus doesn't sound like a typical Second Temple rabbi. He's saying he's above the law and no rabbi at that time would have said that because the law was supreme. Messiah was to come and rule the nation of Israel by the law of God, he wasn't a law unto himself. The law was holy and given to the nation of Israel by God and was very precious in their sight. It's what set them apart from the other nations. It was a sign of their eternal covenant with God.

He also said this:

Matthew 12:1 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath." 3 He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 And if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath."

A Second Temple rabbi would never call himself the Lord of the Sabbath because it is holy and belongs to God. It was the day that man focused his thoughts and attention on God and not his normal, everyday duties. He was to give the day over to God. Jesus was saying that he was somehow the master of that day and that he could determine what men did on the Sabbath. This was totally outside the norm of Jewish thinking because Jesus was saying that he was above the laws that regulated what could be done on the Sabbath. As far as the Pharisees were concerned, Jesus had delusions of grandeur.

And if he was a typical Jew, why were the Pharisees ready to stone him for blaspheming God? He very clearly committed a grave sin in the eyes of the Pharisees because he made himself equal to God:

John 10:24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly." 25 Jesus answered them, "I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. 30 I and the Father are one." 31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. 32 Jesus answered them, "I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?" 33 The Jews answered him, "It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God."

There are many other examples of this in Scripture and reading the Gospel accounts would give anyone pause in thinking of Jesus as a "Jew who never imagined himself outside the normative Jewish tradition." I would also recommend A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. It is an excellent book that provides insight into why the Jews of Jesus' time rejected the claims of Jesus and why Jews of today continue to do so.